Hacker News: RichardLake

New comment by RichardLake in "Bitcoin miners are losing on every coin produced as difficulty drops"

RichardLake — Sat, 11 Apr 2026 14:13:15 +0000

Might be wrong about what Aperocky is alluding to but there is an entirely theoretical edge case. The time to the next difficulty adjustment is based on the current speed of mining, and the possible change in difficulty is capped. With enough minors leaving it will drop the speed of mining/network speed/ and push out the expected time to the next difficulty adjustment. I can't think of any realistic way this can occur given the miners that stay will (personally) be producing blocks as often, the increase in time being balanced out by being a larger proportionate of the mining rate. They don't care if they get 1% of the blocks, which average about 20 mins per block or 5% of the blocks that average 100mins per block.

New comment by RichardLake in "Alzheimer's disease mortality among taxi and ambulance drivers (2024)"

RichardLake — Sun, 29 Mar 2026 09:33:00 +0000

Hmm, never played LoL myself but is keeping track of were the opposing hero can be given were you last saw them a big part of the strategy?

New comment by RichardLake in "Ripgrep is faster than grep, ag, git grep, ucg, pt, sift (2016)"

RichardLake — Tue, 24 Mar 2026 10:06:02 +0000

Was the file in a .gitignore by any chance? I've got my home folder in git to keep track of dot/config files and that always catches me out. Really dislike it defaulting to that ignoring files that are ignored by git.

New comment by RichardLake in "Grammarly is offering ‘expert’ AI reviews from famous dead and living writers"

RichardLake — Mon, 09 Mar 2026 11:55:03 +0000

Maybe because I work on a legacy programming language with far less material in the training? For me it makes a difference because it partly needs to "learn" the language itself and have that in the context, along with codebase specific stuff. For something with the model already knowing the language and only needing codebase specific stuff it might feel different.

New comment by RichardLake in "Grammarly is offering ‘expert’ AI reviews from famous dead and living writers"

RichardLake — Mon, 09 Mar 2026 10:14:19 +0000

That isn't learning, it can read things in its context, and generate materials to assist answering further prompts but that doesn't change the model weights. It is just updating the context.

Unless you are actually fine tuning models, in which case sure, learning is taking place.

New comment by RichardLake in "Wine-Staging 11.1 Adds Patches for Enabling Recent Photoshop Versions on Linux"

RichardLake — Mon, 26 Jan 2026 00:18:17 +0000

Isn't the xbox market dead after after having to code for the weaker series s lead to the last generation of consoles being outsold massively by the PS5?

New comment by RichardLake in "My insulin pump controller uses the Linux kernel. It also violates the GPL"

RichardLake — Sun, 28 Dec 2025 02:03:16 +0000

No it doesn't. It can not bind someone that has not agreed to it. A failure to agree might mean they are infringing on copy-right and is liable for damages, but it is wrong to say it binds everyone that distributes it.

New comment by RichardLake in "My insulin pump controller uses the Linux kernel. It also violates the GPL"

RichardLake — Sat, 27 Dec 2025 09:26:58 +0000

Would you disagree with this logic? You distribute GPL code to me on a dvd. I give that dvd to someone else. I have not made a copy of the source code, so copyright does not come into this. If instead I copied the dvd and emailed the iso to someone else I would be distributing and copyright comes into it.

New comment by RichardLake in "Gunmen kill 9 people at Sydney's Bondi Beach"

RichardLake — Sun, 14 Dec 2025 12:44:27 +0000

To quote a summery from https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/live/2025/dec/14/...

* 12 people are confirmed dead, including 1 gunman. Police described the figures as an evolving situation. * 29 people have been transported to area hospitals in a range of conditions, but officials described the injuries are serious. That figure includes two police officers. * Chris Minns and Anthony Albanese described the shooting as a targeted attack on the Jewish community during the first day of Hanukah. * NSW police commissioner Mal Lanyon has designated the shooting a terrorist incident. * Lanyon said the gunmen used long arms. Police are investigating what’s believed to be several improvised explosive devices in a vehicle at Bondi beach. * Both Minns and Albanese have vowed to support the Jewish community and eradicate hate.

For context by number of deaths this is the second worse mass shooting in post WW2 Australian history.

New comment by RichardLake in "Testing shows automotive glassbreakers can't break modern automotive glass"

RichardLake — Sun, 30 Nov 2025 11:16:04 +0000

Check the class of the fire extinguisher and if it is suited for liquid fires before using it on a oil fire.

New comment by RichardLake in "Way past its prime: how did Amazon get so rubbish?"

RichardLake — Sun, 05 Oct 2025 07:34:23 +0000

How is Japan's customer protection? Here in Australia it is enshrined in law that the seller, Amazon, must handle warranties and such for the expected life of the product.

New comment by RichardLake in "JetBrains will start training AI on your code on non-commercial license"

RichardLake — Thu, 02 Oct 2025 21:55:04 +0000

Cancelled my subscription. I can't take a risk of installing it and having a paid trial or something mean I'm using the non-commercial version for a bit.

New comment by RichardLake in "Managing dotfiles with Make"

RichardLake — Tue, 30 Sep 2025 10:28:57 +0000

Only downside to this are tools that default to only acting on stuff under version control. Whenever I use rg inside my home directory I'm caught out by this.

New comment by RichardLake in "Bullfrog in the Dungeon"

RichardLake — Sat, 16 Aug 2025 00:22:23 +0000

The possess creature was in the first game. Have you tried the original with keeperFX? It improves the UX for building rooms so if that was your issue with the first game.

New comment by RichardLake in "Red Hat Technical Writing Style Guide"

RichardLake — Fri, 11 Jul 2025 14:28:23 +0000

The phase "maybe you should do xyz instead" is active, not passive. Qualifying with maybe doesn't change it from active to passive. Passive would be something like "Maybe XYZ should be done" or "Maybe XYZ would be better".

New comment by RichardLake in "The scientific “unit” we call the decibel"

RichardLake — Thu, 22 May 2025 13:30:31 +0000

That depends, the dropped unit could be either a year or a month.

New comment by RichardLake in "100 Years to Solve an Integral (2020)"

RichardLake — Sun, 20 Apr 2025 11:27:57 +0000

I imagine it was more useful when using tables to lookup/approximate the values before calculators with trig support were a thing.

New comment by RichardLake in "Kagi Assistant is now available to all users"

RichardLake — Fri, 18 Apr 2025 08:54:26 +0000

The other point of view is that they are now forcing users to pay for both search and AI, even if they do not want to use or fund the development of the later. You used to be paying 9$ for search, now you are paying 9$ - x for search and an unknown amount for AI.

New comment by RichardLake in "Cloudflare takes legal action over LaLiga's "disproportionate blocking efforts""

RichardLake — Mon, 24 Feb 2025 11:50:44 +0000

Legally is it collateral damage to unrelated parties. It is cloudflare's servers providing the infringing content, and the cloudflare's servers being blocked. Does Spain net neutrality protections grant some kind of common carrier protections to CDN networks? Would be nice if they did.

New comment by RichardLake in "DOGE has 'god mode' access to government data"

RichardLake — Thu, 20 Feb 2025 09:34:10 +0000

The enforcement of these laws should be a function of the executive. There are ways for the supreme court or congress to intervene when the executive isn't doing their job. Sadly that requires them to believe a series of checks and balances is necessary.

Given that it is down to the voters, and they thought a racist, rapist, conman should be president giving them the power of the executive - which has been growing increasingly powerful for my adult lifetime.